Queer Chat Time! Our Flag Means Queer Futurity, or Munoz + Waititi 4 Ever

[radiantfracture]

This is the post where we take the Muñoz doll and the Our Flag Means Death dolls and make them kiss.

So I’ve been doing a (roughly) fortnightly series here reading José Esteban Muñoz’ book of queer theory Cruising Utopia (2009, 2019), chapter by chapter.

And then we all watched Our Flag Means Death.

It just seems right to try a mashup and see what happens.

Muñoz’s project in Cruising Utopia is to find and (re)claim visions of queer utopias in order to provide inspiration for livable queer futures outside of the stultifying constraints of capitalist heteronormativity.

Pirates are semi-famous for somewhat similar endeavours. Can Our Flag Means Death do some of that work (and play) with and for us? What visions can we use it to conjure?

We could boil down the central questions of the first three chapters of Cruising Utopia sort of like this:

• How can the utopian visions of past queer communities inform our visions of a future that's livable for all queer folks, not just the privileged few?
• What do the utopian visions of the past tell us about what we are missing and longing for right now?
• What practices already exist in our present communities that could provide inspirations for queer futures?

So some questions about Our Flag Means Death might be these:

• What images from the past (history, media) do you see Our Flag Means Death talking back to?
  • Ex. histories of piracy, readings of history, queerbaiting in mainstream series, Black Sails?
• What are you longing for that these pirates have? How does OFMD illuminate what is missing in the present?
• What about this show (or how it came to be) could be useful in thinking about how to make queer art / art about queers going forward?
• Alternatively, what do you know about queerness and community that Our Flag Means Death doesn’t yet know?

For example, I really like that you do not have to be cool to be part of this queer pirate crew. In fact, trying to be cool makes you miserable, fake, and impossible to live with (Izzy Hands, the French). Being a big ridiculous grimy mess is ideal on the Revenge. I appreciate this.

Anyway, the formal invitation is to think about Muñoz with OFMD, but feel free to party any way you like, provided it's respectful and consensual.

And if part of the way you appreciate things is to talk about what's flawed or disappointing about them, that is welcome, too.

* * * * * *

Previous posts on Munoz:

Munoz Chapter 1

Munoz Chapter 2

Munoz Chapter 3



{rf}

Comments

[radiantfracture]

It's the drawn out romance with the two leads that makes it completely unexpected.

For me it was also an incredible relief to have a show finally admit that this is always a possibility in any story of human connection -- one option is that they are in love, one option is that they desire each other. Yes folks even if it's men. Two men can have feelings in the same room without it burning down.

It just *is* a possibility, and if that energy, that chemistry is there, it can be the best way to tell a particular story. And it can weirdly distort your storytelling if you *don't* tell it that way, or if you go out of your way to try to unstitch all the queerbaiting you did in earlier seasons. (Looks beadily at /Sherlock/.)

But was the slow burn slow and burning enough for you?

[sabotabby]

For once, I'd say yes, within both the confines of a sitcom-length show with 10 episodes and the additional challenge they'd imposed on themselves to follow rom com beats. Especially since they're determined to make it difficult.

Like of course my platonic ideal of queer relationships on telly are things like BS, which took five seasons to tell its queer love stories, She-Ra, which did about the same, or things like Good Omens and Guardian (which I would argue are not examples of queerbaiting for different reasons) with, respectively, 6000 and 10,000 years of the characters pining for each other. But it's not so much the speed for me as the emotional journey, the "fuck, I love this person who everyone around me has told me is not a possibility in any way." And it does that beautifully and painfully.

[radiantfracture]

which I would argue are not examples of queerbaiting for different reasons

I think I can work out for Guardian, but if you like tell me about your Good Omens theory (or both -- I just like theories) --

[sabotabby]

Guardian isn't really a theory: the source text was explicitly gay, the protagonists have sex on page multiple times and end up as partners (who call each other husband and wife, which is a bit icky but I'll chalk that up to translation), and they could not show it on screen without Chinese censors coming down hard. Though, in doing that but still trying to signal the relationship, they somehow made it more queer. I don't particularly love the sex scenes in the book—partly it's a translation issue, but also some of the dynamics are quite problematic—and the eye-fucking that happens in the show really gives the sense that these two characters have been in a star-crossed relationship for 10,000 years, which feels more true emotionally to the core of the story.

With Good Omens, the show is getting a season 2, and you can kind of sense they might have been saving some things in case it got renewed, so I really don't think it's queerbaiting so much as testing the waters to see what they can get away with in the future. Neil Gaiman has said that they're meant to be in a relationship, all the beats are set up as a relationship, and we don't even get a No Homo decoy love interest for either of them to suggest that there is any possibility of another relationship in their lives.

But there is also the fact that 1) this is a slow burn love story with immortal characters, and 2) they're not human and don't have the same relationship parameters that we do. Canonically they don't have parts. Which means that the creator saying that they're queer and together, and everything in the show pointing to a relationship as the characters would define it, doesn't to me feel like queerbaiting at all. It just suggests a relationship that is not human and that evolves at a glacial pace.

I am also concerned, in GO's case, about the close relationship of the creators to fandom. Fandom really wants things to be explicit on screen, but fandom is not a unified body, and there are people who want to see the characters get naked on screen and fuck, presumably, and people who are clinging very hard to them as ace representation. I think both are very valid interpretations but going either direction cuts some possibilities off, and I hope the creators at least keep those details a little ambiguous, both for storytelling's sake (I do not want to see Awkward Representation Dialogue inserted in a story that really isn't about that), and to allow for imaginative possibilities for fandom to interpret.

I think I've mentioned this before, but my comparison is always my favourite het relationship in The Hour, where you have Lix and Randall alluding to a relationship that was definitely sexual during the Spanish Civil War—they had a child, after all—but never actually doing anything on screen besides touching hands and eye-fucking, and it's approximately 1000x more compelling than the main characters' relationship (which, don't get me wrong, is great). It's all subtext but done in such a way that it is obvious to the viewer what they are to each other.

It's interesting in OFMD that the creators reference Mulder and Scully, which IMO opinion was absolutely ruined by them getting together on screen. I think that could have happened in a satisfying way, but it was a result of fandom interference and you can tell.